The lane we wandered up had been, and was still in places, a watercourse, and we struggled along the steep chasms gouged out of the soft soil, and clambered over rocks which had withstood the torrent.
By-and-by a red door intervened on our left, fitted into an imposing whitewashed arched gateway, with a mounting-block on each side, and the great brass ring-shaped knocker in the middle of the door which the Moors have left all over Spain—the garden-house of the French Consul. In another four months, when all aristocratic Tetuan would migrate in a body into their "summer-houses," and by their mutual presence reassure each other as to their safety, the Consul would move out of the city: at present he would look on such a step as sheer madness.
An old negro slave, with a beard like cotton-wool, was at work in the garden, and, opening the door, let us in to look round. A wide gravel path led up to the dazzling walls of the house, spotless as a sheet of glazed cream-laid note-paper, the window-frames and door picked out with Reckitt's blue. A white railing in front edged the terrace, the steps of which were tanned by the damp salt air a fine rusty ochre. The house inside was built on the invariable Moorish lines—kitchen and inferior rooms on the ground floor, one great lofty room above, and the flat roof over all. A garden-room flanked the house on the south-east, the front open to the garden, pillared and arched with the old white plastered "horse-shoe." In underneath the arches were shade and cool tiling, and outside more tiled ground suggested steaming brews of fragrant green tea, tiny glasses, low tables, and long divans spread under the sky.
It was a grey day, and height beyond height on into the Riff country was cloud-capped, while shar d'jebel (the hair of the mountain, as the Moors call snow) whitened a few furrowed peaks. The flats lay below to the left, and a horizontal blue pencil line was scored beyond them. Cow-birds stalked about the garden among some new vines which the old negro was putting in.
We sat down on the terrace, looking at the view, and the silence of the place was above all things most striking. A cavalcade of mules tailed away in the distance in single file along the faint track to the sea; the packed white city lay to the right, but no voices reached us; here cart-wheels, railway-trains, threshing-machines, and busy farm life were not. It would have been hard to age and wrinkle in such a spot—Adam and Eve might have felt at home.
It was also a weedy one, this Paradise: a tangle of greenery spread underneath the oranges, hanging like yellow trimming on a green fabric, choking the vines and a few scarlet geraniums. Labour, in such indolent and self-possessed acres, was a crude and gauche idea.
The greybeard with the marmoset face and leathern apron let us out at the red door: he had a history. His master, a prosperous Moor, once offered to free him: the old slave refused the offer, on the score that he was quite content as he was. However, his master urged him to accept, and he was eventually given his freedom. But later on the master lost all his money, and ruin was before him. His old slave came back. "See here, my master; here am I. Take me; sell me"; and he finally persuaded the man to sell him. He seemed contented enough as the property of the French Consul, who is a Moor.
We passed a party of closely veiled women, as we strolled citywards, taking advantage of a break in the wet weather to visit their gardens, carrying a great key, and accompanied by two or three ink-black slaves, fine upstanding women, well fed and clothed, looking good-tempered to a fault, whose children, by the same husband and master, would rank equally with those of the wives.
Mohammedan women, though veiled and supervised, have at least their gardens to saunter out to and visit when the tracks allow. Jewesses in Morocco deserve infinitely more pity. Their one recreation seemed to consist in walking as far as the Jewish cemetery, ten minutes outside the Gate of the Tombs, and attending to the gravestones of their friends.
The cemetery is gradually absorbing one side of a rough red-earthed hill; it has no fence of any description round it, and the flat pale-blue and white tombstones spread over the ground look in the distance like so much washing out to dry. The stones are all alike, oblong lozenges, inscribed in Hebrew.